The Posteverything Generation
后一切的一代
I never expected to gain any new insight into the nature of my generation, or the changing landscape of American colleges, in Lit Theory. Lit Theory is supposed to be the class where you sit at the back of the room with every other jaded sophomore wearing skinny jeans, thick-framed glasses, an ironic tee-shirt and over-sized retro headphones, just waiting for lecture to be over so you can light up a Turkish Gold and walk to lunch while listening to Wilco. That’s pretty much the way I spent the course, too: through structuralism, formalism, gender theory, and post-colonialism, I was far too busy shuffling through my Ipod to see what the patriarchal world order of capitalist oppression had to do with Ethan Frome. But when we began to study postmodernism, something struck a chord with me and made me sit up and look anew at the seemingly blasé college-aged literati of which I was so self-consciously one.
要对我这代人的本质，或美国大学嬗变图景有所新知，我从不指望文学理论。上这门课无非是坐在教室后排，周围是别的大二学生，也都萎靡不振，他们个个身着紧身牛仔裤，戴着粗框眼镜，穿着讽刺标语文化衫，还架着副超大的复古耳机，就等着讲座结束，好让自己点上一根土耳其金牌香烟，边听着“照办乐队”边走去用午餐。我也正是这么捱过这门课的：听着结构主义、形式主义、性别理论、以及后殖民主义，只顾摆弄着Ipod，而无暇搞清楚受资本主义压迫的父权世界秩序与《伊坦·弗洛美》究竟有何关系。可是，在我们开始学习后现代主义时，有什么东西触动了我的心弦，使我开了窍，并重审那群看似麻木的大学知识青年，我自觉也是其中一员。
According to my textbook, the problem with defining postmodernism is that it’s impossible. The difficulty is that it is so...post. It defines itself so negatively against what came before it – naturalism, romanticism and the wild revolution of modernism – that it’s sometimes hard to see what it actually is. It denies that anything can be explained neatly or even at all. It is parodic, detached, strange, and sometimes menacing to traditionalists who do not understand it. Although it arose in the post-war west (the term was coined in 1949), the generation that has witnessed its ascendance has yet to come up with an explanation of what postmodern attitudes mean for the future of culture or society. The subject intrigued me because, in a class otherwise consumed by dead-letter theories, postmodernism remained an open book, tempting to the young and curious. But it also intrigued me because the question of what postmodernism – what a movement so post-everything, so reticent to define itself – is spoke to a larger question about the political and popular culture of today, of the other jaded sophomores sitting around me who had grown up in a postmodern world.
照我教科书的说法，后现代主义是无法定义的，这是问题所在。困难在于其如此之“后”，定义它要靠先于它者来托显——自然主义、浪漫主义、及现代主义的狂热革命——它对这些一概拒斥，有时真让人搞不清其究竟为何了。它拒不承认竟有可说清之理。它善于戏谑，清高古怪，又常对不解其道的守旧派摆出咄咄逼人之势。后现代主义虽肇始于战后的西方（该术语诞生于1949年），然而，后现代观念对文化或社会的未来究竟有何意义，亲睹其兴的那代人不得不提供一番解释。这话题牢牢抓住了我，一则因为在那堂幸未被僵死的理论占据的课上，后现代主义展开了书卷，吸引着好奇的年轻人；二则因为解答何为后现代主义——这一后一切的运动，讳言自己究竟为何——便能解答一个更大的问题，它关涉当今的，及那些萎靡不振地坐在我周围，长于后现代世界的大二学生的政治文化与大众文化。
In many ways, as a college-aged generation, we are also extremely post: post-Cold War, post-industrial, post-baby boom, post-9/11...at one point in his famous essay, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” literary critic Frederic Jameson even calls us “post-literate.” We are a generation that is riding on the tail-end of a century of war and revolution that toppled civilizations, overturned repressive social orders, and left us with more privilege and opportunity than any other society in history. Ours could be an era to accomplish anything.
在许多方面，我们上大学的这一代，也是极其“后”的：后冷战、后工业时代、后婴儿潮、后9.11……文艺批评家雷德里克·詹姆逊之名文“后现代主义，或资本主义后期之文化逻辑”中，有一处甚至称我们为“后知识分子”。我们这代人正抓着战争与革命的世纪的尾巴，在这个世纪，多少文明衰落了，多少强权的社会秩序被颠覆了，我们也被赋予了更多的特权与机遇，这是有史以来其他社会不曾有过的。我们生活在一个能让人大展宏图的时代。
And yet do we take to the streets and the airwaves and say “here we are, and this is what we demand”? Do we plant our flag of youthful rebellion on the mall in Washington and say “we are not leaving until we see change! Our eyes have been opened by our education and our conception of what is possible has been expanded by our privilege and we demand a better world because it is our right”? It would seem we do the opposite. We go to war without so much as questioning the rationale, we sign away our civil liberties, we say nothing when the Supreme Court uses Brown v. Board of Education to outlaw segregation, and we sit back to watch the carnage on the evening news.
然而，我们是不是要走上大街，或在电视和广播里大喊“我们来了，这就是我们的要求”？是不是要把我们青春的叛逆旗帜插上华盛顿广场，喊道“不看到变化决不离开！我们受了教育，开了眼界；我们有了特权，以前不可能的皆将可能；我们想要一个更美好的世界，因为这是我们的权力”？而我们的行动似乎恰恰相反。我们不问青红皂白便奔赴战场；我们放弃自己的公民自由权；当最高法院凭布朗诉托皮卡教育局案废止了种族隔离，我们也未表态；我们悠闲地坐着观看晚间新闻里的流血冲突。
On campus, we sign petitions, join organizations, put our names on mailing lists, make small-money contributions, volunteer a spare hour to tutor, and sport an entire wardrobe’s worth of Live Strong bracelets advertising our moderately priced opposition to everything from breast cancer to global warming. But what do we really stand for? Like a true postmodern generation we refuse to weave together an overarching narrative to our own political consciousness, to present a cast of inspirational or revolutionary characters on our public stage, or to define a specific philosophy. We are a story seemingly without direction or theme, structure or meaning – a generation defined negatively against what came before us. When Al Gore once said “It’s the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism,” he might as well have been echoing his entire generation’s critique of our own. We are a generation for whom even revolution seems trite, and therefore as fair a target for blind imitation as anything else. We are the generation of the Che Geuvera tee-shirt.
在校园里，我们签署各类请愿书，加入各式各样的组织，在各种邮件通讯录中添加自己的名字，给伤病抚恤基金捐款，抽一小时空去当义务家庭教师，炫耀够买下一柜子衣物的印有“坚强生活”标语的腕带，以宣扬我们对一切事物的温和抵抗，不论是乳腺癌还是全球变暖。可我们真正代表的是什么？正如不折不扣的后现代派，我们不愿头头是道地阐述我们的政治觉悟，不愿供出我们公众舞台上那群鼓舞斗志的革命者，不愿给某种哲学去下定义。我们如同一篇看似没有方向或主题，没有结构或意义的故事——定义我们这一代，要靠先于我们者托显。艾伯特·戈尔曾说“自恋加虚无才能真正定义后现代主义”，这番话倒是在为批评我们这代人的他那一代帮腔。我们这代人是连革命都已觉得过时的，它也因此只是盲目效仿的对象，跟别的东西没什么两样。我们是身着切·格瓦拉T恤的一代。
Jameson calls it “Pastiche” – “the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.” In literature, this means an author speaking in a style that is not his own – borrowing a voice and continuing to use it until the words lose all meaning and the chaos that is real life sets in. It is an imitation of an imitation, something that has been re-envisioned so many times the original model is no longer relevant or recognizable. It is mass-produced individualism, anticipated revolution. It is why postmodernism lacks cohesion, why it seems to lack purpose or direction. For us, the post-everything generation, pastiche is the use and reuse of the old clichés of social change and moral outrage – a perfunctory rebelliousness that has culminated in the age of rapidly multiplying non-profits and relief funds. We live our lives in masks and speak our minds in a dead language – the language of a society that expects us to agitate because that’s what young people do. But how do we rebel against a generation that is expecting, anticipating, nostalgic for revolution?
詹姆逊称后现代主义为“戏谑性混搭”——“戴着语言的面具，说着僵死的语言。”在文学中，这意味着作者用非本人的风格说话——借一种语调，用到语词失去所有含义，现实生活喧嚷而入。这是一种模仿的模仿，某物经反复构思，其原型已与之毫无瓜葛且不可辨。这是一种批量生产的个人主义，一场预感要来临的革命。正因此，后现代主义缺乏凝聚力，似乎丧失了目标或方向。对于我们后一切这代人来说，“戏谑性混搭”意味着一而再再而三地运用社会变革及道德义愤的老套路——这是种装模作样的反叛，在急速发展的非营利组织和救济金的时代达到了高峰。我们戴着面具生活，用僵死的语言表达思想——使用该语言的社会期望我们揭竿而起，因为这才是年轻人所为。但我们怎能反叛那期盼并怀念着革命的一代呢？
How do we rebel against parents that sometimes seem to want revolution more than we do? We don’t. We rebel by not rebelling. We wear the defunct masks of protest and moral outrage, but the real energy in campus activism is on the internet, with websites like moveon.org. It is in the rapidly developing ability to communicate ideas and frustration in chatrooms instead of on the streets, and channel them into nationwide projects striving earnestly for moderate and peaceful change: we are the generation of Students Taking Action Now Darfur; we are the Rock the Vote generation; the generation of letter-writing campaigns and public interest lobbies; the alternative energy generation.
我们怎能反叛有时比我们更想闹革命的父母呢？我们不能反叛。不反叛便是我们的反叛。虽然我们戴着抗议与道德义愤的腐朽面具，但校园行动的真正力量还是在互联网上，诸如moveon.org这类网站。有一项能力获得了迅速发展，即在网络聊天室，而非跑到大街上去交流思想和受挫感，并将其转化为举国上下争取温和而和平变革的举措：我们是“同学们，行动起来：达尔富尔”口号的一代；是“摇滚投票”运动的一代；是写信运动及公众利益游说团的一代；亦是替代能源的一代。
College as America once knew it – as an incubator of radical social change – is coming to an end. To our generation the word “radicalism” evokes images of al Qaeda, not the Weathermen. “Campus takeover” sounds more like Virginia Tech in 2007 than Columbia University in 1968. Such phrases are a dead language to us. They are vocabulary from another era that does not reflect the realities of today. However, the technological revolution, the moveon.org revolution, the revolution of the organization kid, is just as real and just as profound as the revolution of the 1960’s – it is just not as visible. It is a work in progress, but it is there. Perhaps when our parents finally stop pointing out the things that we are not, the stories that we do not write, they will see the threads of our narrative begin to come together; they will see that behind our pastiche, the post generation speaks in a language that does make sense. We are writing a revolution. We are just putting it in our own words.
昔时美国人理解的大学——激进的社会变革的温床——正行将消亡。对我们这代人来说，“激进主义”一词让我们联想到的是基地组织，而非气象员组织。“校园接管”听起来不太像1968年的哥伦比亚大学，而更像2007年的弗吉尼亚州理工大学。这些语汇对我们来说已成僵死的语言，它们是另一个时代的产物，已不能反映当今现实了。然而，科技革命、“向前进”革命、“组织孩童”革命，就像20世纪60年代的革命那样动真格，那样深刻——无非没那么张扬而已。这些革命虽在推进之中，但已显端倪。或许，等我们的父母终于不再指摘我们不能成为什么人物，谱写出什么传奇，他们会从我们的话里看出些头绪，明白在我们的“戏谑性混搭”背后，下一代说的话也有一定道理。我们在书写革命，在用自己的语言书写。
